#psych medication talk

[deoidesign]

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[an-albino-pinetree]

Hi hi! How are you?

Hello hello!! I’m good! I just woke up not too ago :] 💚

I hope you’re doing well too!

[zymstarz]

i suddenly became aware of what i looked like and had to stop everything to draw it

[romance-incubomp3]

like if therapy and meds help you that’s so cool but it drives me insane how people treat those as some magical cure all that EVERYONE needs to seek out even though the psych industry is fucked and biased and not affordable and if trying to find a good therapist or find the right meds is doing nothing but causing you even more stress and anxiety even after you’ve been trying to get help for years than maybe it’s not worth it at that point

[floral-hex]

fuck, I hate telehealth, but ya know, I think I’d actually like it if it was in minecraft instead of a video call. Let’s do therapy in roblox or something.

[brattybottombunny]

my heart is swelling with queer joy 🥹

[the-adas]

i lowkey hate the schizophrenia subreddit

[cornsnoot]

hi hello followers, for any of you on adhd medication, can i ask how much you feel like it helps?? and how long it took to find the right medication for you?

[eclarinet]

same soup... different day

[nintendont2502]

jesus christ can I go back to being too anxious to talk to people instead of being the world's most obnoxious mfer who Cannot shut the hell up to save his life

[spurgie-cousin]

My moral OCD is coming back, and for me its the matter of Palestine. I'm 100% pro-Palestine of course, but I have a few friends and people (mainly liberal-leaning crowd) I'm friendly with who are more neutral/aren't educated on this subject, and I don't know how to feel about it. I know its a complex subject especially the ones who have Jewish heritage, but also its not complex at all. I kind of need someone to tell me what to do.

As someone who talks to their psych/therapist about similar OCD behaviors every session I can guarantee you no one can help you with that but a trained professional. Your friends or family do not understand that part of your behavior is motivated by compulsion so they will almost never give you good advice.

I would recommend a professional who is both a psych/therapist like I have as the best option, a psych as the second best, and a licensed therapist as the third best.

[gumheel]

well my fears have come to fruition. my therapist has told me to get assessed for autism

[novelconcepts]

Might be a dumb question but are feral/wolf queen vans injuries worse than canons? Because the way you describe them make it sound like they are but im not sure

It’s less that her injuries are worse and more that she doesn’t heal as cleanly. There’s a bit of suspension of disbelief to how canon Van’s scars work, which makes a lot of sense from a television perspective. There’s an actor to take into consideration, and really leaning into how gnarly those wounds would be—how they’d fuck up Van’s face permanently—would mess with Hewson’s performance for the rest of the show. I’ll never begrudge them the surprisingly solid healing process Van manages in the middle of the woods with no real medical help, cuz…television. (Also, it really works with Van’s whole immortality thing.)

But in that story, there’s no such consideration to be made. The injuries are about the same, but I chose to have them take a greater toll. She hasn’t been held down for a stitching process, she’s violently flailing around the whole time, so the scars are going to be a little more grievous. Her left eye doesn’t function anymore. She’s not necessarily more injured, she’s just more permanently devastated by those injuries.

Beyond all of that, the thing I really wanted to play with in that story was less the physical transformation and more…how far having just a little faith goes, in canon, for Van’s well-being. In that story, I took it away. I took away the necklace, I took away her belief in Lottie. Her injuries are really messing with her, but so is her mental state. Even when she heals on the surface as best she can, what’s going on inside is what really counts.

[trans-axolotl]

hi! can i ask you to elaborate on the right to decline psych meds? asking as someone with severe bipolar that really negatively impacts my life but also as someone who does not want to take meds, both for personal and political reasons, and feels self conscious about that. i would love more perspectives on it tho if you have the time and energy! if not no worries of course, take care <3

hey anon! So i'm going to give like five disclaimers before getting into it because I have seen the way tumblr misinterprets my posts before lmao. I feel comfortable sharing my own experiences, but I am only one bipolar person and don't want people to generalize what I'm saying as applicable to what decisions they should make about their meds. there's a lot of factors that go into deciding to take or not take meds and I can't give advice like that over the internet. i'm also not an expert on psych meds and can't give medical advice.

with all of that out of the way, I want to talk a little bit about why I currently refuse to take meds. i fundamentally believe that everyone has the right to choose the way they want to experience the world, and always has the right to choose what we put in our bodies. for me, I see my bipolar as less of a transient state and more as a neurotype. experiencing life through cycles and in extremes is something that is meaningful to me. I don't love every aspect of being bipolar, but I can't imagine myself without it because it affects every part of the way I perceive and interact with the world. there's a lot of value that going through mood cycles brings to my life in the way that i understand the world and process events, and i like having times where I have endless energy and can be social and make big decisions and work on projects, and I like having times where I can feel emotions and be contemplative and feel in touch with sadness and be able to take a moment to slow down. there are also some things I fucking hate about bipolar, like the way I feel during a manic episode when I'm too restless and it's like there's bugs in my skin, psychosis making me fucking terrified in a way that's hard to cope with, reckless decisions interfering with relationships, or how sometimes when I'm in a depressive episode I can't get up out of bed, am so numb that I can't support people in my life, and get suicidal. but for me, my experience with bipolar is a lot more complex and I don't wish to experience life without bipolar. the way that most medications have interacted with me has taken away all the parts of myself that I recognize, and i have been made to feel like being bipolar was the "problem."

my experience with psych meds has mostly been in situations where I was forcibly drugged in the psych ward, which brought a hell of a lot of trauma with it. the main reason I don't take medication is because that experience traumatized me to the point where I now often have paranoid delusions about medication, so I can't consistently stay on daily medication. even though i often have insight and I am usually pretty aware of my delusions, they happen frequently enough that trying to get me to stay on meds for more than a couple weeks would be a losing battle, and I'm not interested in going through withdrawal symptoms every few weeks.

beyond that, I don't go on psych meds right now because the medications I have tried numbed me out and made me so low energy that I could barely function in my daily life or socialize or do anything that was important to me. it stabilized my moods, but left me feeling nothing instead. there were also some physical side effects that i really disliked, and altogether, that wasn't worth it for me. i wanted to be able to choose the way of experiencing the world that felt the most authentic and also the most manageable. for me, the tradeoff of having stable moods was not worth it for everything I lost from having access to my emotions and ability to experience those highs and lows. i have enough coping skills and enough of a support system that dealing with the shitty parts of bipolar without meds is a reality for me. and the way I see it, no matter who I am or what diagnosis I have or what meds I'm on, there are going to be shitty days, and it's okay if my shitty days are on a different scale and don't look like the shitty days of someone who doesn't have bipolar. i'm open to medication in the future, especially when i get to a stage in my life when I'm having kids, because I think my priorities around stability and mood cycles might change. but for now, i feel very comfortable not trying out medication and just experiencing my mood cycles the way they are.

i think that medications are very helpful for some people, but my perspective on psychiatry is that the decisions should always be in our hands to decide what our actual priorities are. psychiatry operates by saying that everyone with bipolar's goal must be having stable moods and no symptoms. there's a million different ways to be bipolar and experience our symptoms. some bipolar people might think that physical side effects are a perfectly fine trade off for not having to deal with manic episodes. some bipolar people might feel particularly strongly about wanting medication to help with their depressive episodes, but not care about the rest. some bipolar people might take meds as needed, but not long term. there's a million different ways that we can experience the same diagnosis, and i believe that treatment needs to have space for all of these experiences, and respect our autonomy in choosing what our individual priorities are. I think there also needs to be a lot more awareness and understanding about the actual efficacy of medications. medications are going to work differently for every individual, and there is not one magic medication regime that can be backed up with evidence to show that it actually always reduces symptoms. mad/mentally ill/ neurodivergent people deserve a lot more honesty from our providers about the parts of medication management that truly is trial and error, instead of being made to feel like we're a failure because medications don't provide instant freedom from all of our distress.

there are lots of reasons that people might not want to be on meds and I unequivocally support anyone's right to make their own decision about medication, regardless of their psych's opinions on it. whether people don't want to take meds because of trauma, because they don't trust doctors, because they don't like the physical side effects, because they don't like feeling numb, because they don't agree with the idea that certain symptoms are harmful, because they're tired of trying out new medications, because they don't want to take meds that prevent them from drinking alcohol, because they can't pay for them, because they won't regularly remember to take them, because they only want to be on some types of meds and not others, or for literally any reason, people always should have the final say on what goes into our body.

if other people want to add on their perspective on medication, please feel free! I am only one person and I don't think my way of thinking about medication is the only way, and that there is room for a lot of experiences. I'm also going to link the Harm reduction guide to psychiatric drugs, and strongly recommend that people don't make changes to their medication habits without educating yourself on the risks, your own personal vulnerabilities, and what steps you can take to make it safer.

[justareallyboredfangirl]

am i the only one who sees the word “delulu” and fucking snarls lmao ?

[catkin-morgs-kookaburralover]

I wonder what the definition of 'superficial' is in this context